Page 4. Land loss

Colonisation and settlement

In 1839 Colonel William Wakefield had to work with the
conquering tribes to establish the New Zealand Company’s
Wellington and Nelson settlement schemes. After three very
dubious purchases (since discredited) the company acquired
1.2 million hectares on both sides of Cook Strait. Soon
after, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed at three locations
in the Marlborough districts, but Nelson chiefs were not
given a chance to consider the matter. Wellington, the first
company settlement, was established almost immediately, and
the Nelson scheme was launched two years later under Captain
Arthur Wakefield, William’s brother. Arthur Wakefield had to
negotiate with the resident chiefs for rights to settle the
Nelson districts.

Commerce and trade

Initially relationships between settlers and Māori were
good, and Māori harvests and catches sustained settler
families as they cleared land for their own crops. However,
relations deteriorated as New Zealand Company and Crown
officials reneged on terms of the ‘purchases’, and disputes
over land ownership, boundaries and trespass erupted from
time to time.

Despite these setbacks, Nelson Māori continued to
participate in the new economy. Māori-owned ships worked the
New Zealand coast, carrying Māori and European produce within
Nelson–Marlborough and to North Island ports. More than 400
hectares under Māori cultivation produced hundreds of tons of
potatoes and thousands of bushels of wheat for sale at Nelson
markets, the whaling stations, Wellington and further
afield.

The Wairau incident

The New Zealand Company’s Nelson settlement scheme called
for 1,100 allotments of 201 acres each, which had to be
‘arable, cultivable land’. In total 221,100 acres (89,433
hectares) was required, of which one-tenth would become the
‘Native Tenths Reserves’.

Unfortunately, there was not enough suitable land, and in
early 1843 company surveyors were sent to the unpurchased
Wairau plains. Te Rauparaha and other Ngāti Toa chiefs
immediately objected that these lands had not been included
in the company’s 1839 ‘purchases’.

After months of fruitless protest and lobbying, in early
June 1843 the Ngāti Toa chiefs evicted the surveyors and
burnt their temporary shelters. Te Rauparaha reasoned that
these were built from materials growing on his lands. Arthur
Wakefield and Police Magistrate Henry Thompson responded by
arming a settler militia and attempting to arrest the chiefs
at Wairau. On June 17 the situation deteriorated into a
confrontation in which 22 Europeans and at least four Māori
were killed.

The effect was catastrophic: relations between Māori and
Pākehā were never to be the same again.

Loss of land

In 1853 Governor George Grey took 371 hectares of Motueka
Native Reserve lands for the Anglican Church’s Whakarewa
School, without offering compensation. This removed the best
of the Nelson tribes’ productive lands, leaving them bereft
of income; they were evicted from their homes and
cultivations. Land Commissioner Donald McLean’s ‘Waipounamu
purchases’ of 1853–56, together with the Native Reserves Act
1856 and later amendments, set the scene for 120 years of
Māori alienation from their lands.

Considerable damage was done by perpetually renewable
leases (in the 1880s), the targeting of native reserves for
public purposes, the Crown’s compulsory acquisition of
‘uneconomic interests’ (in the 1950s), and the freeholding of
Māori reserves to lessees (in the 1960s and 1970s).

The Crown facilitated these actions by appointing trustees
of native reserves, leaving Māori owners with no influence on
the management of their lands. By the 1970s Nelson Māori were
left with little more than 3,000 of approximately 20,000
acres (1,200 of 8,000 hectares) guaranteed by the 1840s land
purchase agreements. These losses were devastating and
contributed to poor health, low educational achievement and
the scattering of the Māori population from the area.